The first time I met my writing mentor, he was already dead. I’ll call him W.D., short for writing daemon, but that wasn’t his name in life. I just don’t want to cause any trouble or be sued by W.D.’s estate or something. And besides, a writing daemon is what he came to be, my very own personal curse.
My friend Jim worked nights at a funeral home on the outskirts of _________________________, and that’s where poor old W.D. turned up, so recently deceased the embalming fluid was still being pumped into his veins.
“Guess who I’m chilling with tonight?” Jim said in his usual sardonic manner, his voice muffled by the cell phone.
“Elvis.”
“Even better—for you, anyway. W.D.” A pause because I didn’t immediately respond. “Isn’t he like, your favorite writer?”
I could only mouth the word “yes,” for W.D. was more than my favorite writer, he was an admitted obsession, the reason why I wanted to be a writer. I’m not saying that I would have broken his legs and forced him to write novels for my pet pig, but yes…I was quite a fan.
“You want to come over here?” Jim asked.
“And do what?”
“Necrophilia, obviously,” Jim said. He laughed his rough, sand-paper laugh, “Just kidding,” he continued, “I just figured maybe you’d want to pay your last respects or whatever. If it’s going to creep you out or something then forget I said anything.”
But Jim didn’t comprehend the reason for my hesitation: I wasn’t nervous or afraid, what tripped up my words was pure, juvenile excitement. I had been in a funk all day after learning of W.D.’s passing. I had hoped to meet the great author in person someday, to talk about writing craft, but now his heart-attack had ended that possibility. (Or so I thought.)
A month earlier I had buried my own father, with whom I had always maintained a cool relationship. It seemed to be a year of death, and it was only February. But more than that, W.D.’s passing meant that the world would never again see fresh material from that master of horror. Sure, maybe his publisher would sift through his personal notes and stitch together a posthumous work or two, but you know how that usually goes: junk, a mocking cherry on the sundae of a gifted author’s career.
An hour later I was outside the great old funeral home, which itself looked like the proper setting of an W.D. novel. It stood solitary in its own coffin-shaped outline, its face shrouded in a vail of screens and wire fencing, and its rigor mortis-stiff back abutting a motionless creek beset by groves of water-logged trees.
Jim greeted me at the front door with a feline smile. “He’s downstairs,” Jim said in a serious tone, the type he probably took with children of the deceased when pitching extra services.
I followed him through the carpeted first floor, then down unvarnished stares into the basement belly of the structure. Each stair creaked, and with each groan I felt a bit jumpy. I had a moment to think, and for the first time that evening a thought like guilt whimpered through my mind. W.D. meant everything to me—more than he could ever know, certainly, and yet to him I was just another faceless fan. I pondered what W.D. would think if he saw me stowing away like some thief in the night, just to get a glimpse of his chilled body at repose.
“Here he is,” Jim said, leading me into a dim room, one lit by horizontal strands of tired yellow lighting.
“This place is creepy,” I said to Jim.
“Yeah, it’s a funeral home,” Jim said evenly, apparently immune to fear from years of working the night shift in that lonely place.
“The lights seem kind of twitchy; I wonder if this house still uses fuses rather than a circuit breaker?”
“The electric’s fine,” Jim said in a cryptic manner, shaking his head and twisting his fingers together and apart like thorny brambles succumbing to an early frost. “So do you want to see your boy or not?”
“Yes,” I said. “Very much so.”
Jim stepped forward and removed a white sheet from the corpse.
“So, this guy was your hero?” Jim asked, pointing to the very old, very dead man. They had dressed W.D.’s body in a woolen charcoal suit, and freshly applied cadaver makeup already marked his features as false and dead.
“Yes,” I whispered, telling myself not to make a fuss, not to reach out and touch the body.
“I hope he wrote better than he looks.”
“He didn’t look like this while he was alive.”
“How do you know?”
“I actually saw him speak a couple of times.” Of course it was more like a dozen times, though I never had the guts to approach him, not even for a signature at a book signing.
“I’ll have to check out his work,” Jim said.
Of course you will, now, I thought. Why do we always find the dead more fascinating than the living? There’s no better way to get an author’s work to sell than death.
“Do you mind if I have a minute alone?” I asked.
“With—with the corpse?”
“Just a moment of silence type thing.”
Jim shook his head as though he were slowly grafting a smile onto his grim features. “I mean, I guess so….”
Then I was alone with W.D.; alone in the haunting serenity of that Victorian building.
“I’m sorry this happened to you,” I offered. No response, of course, for W.D. was dead.
“Your novel ____________________ taught me so much about writing,” I whispered. “Someday I hope to be half as good as you are….were.”
I looked down at the blurry features, the broad riveted forehead that shined in the half-light of the old furnace lights, the serious nose—a writer’s nose, I thought. His eyes were drawn tight and shut, and I had to fight back the urge to open them. His ring finger was starkly empty, for W.D. never married. “I am married to my characters,” he said once at a lecture I attended in _______________________. “and if they could divorce me, I’m sure they would.”
I cursed myself for never approaching W.D. while I had the chance. I thought of all the times I could have raised my hand at a Q&A, or even approached the novelist at a signing, yet I didn’t because I feared making a fool of myself. Now W.D. was before me again, only this time I could bare his presence without fear of judgment. It no longer felt like I was approaching God.
His face drooped just a bit—death will change the features of a man—but he still looked infused with life. I half-expected him to rise up and to start speaking, to start flashing those wondrous, twinkling eyes, the ones that made everyone who watched him lecture feel warm inside, as though he was but the kindly neighbor next door, or the great uncle you just couldn’t wait to catch up with each Thanksgiving. But no, there was no movement, and both he and I remained very still for a long time.
“How did you do it?” I asked the corpse. “How did you breathe such life into your characters?” A dew-drop of a tear formed in the bottom corner of my right eye. “Everything I write seems so stiff and lifeless. But you, sir. Well…every word you wrote danced with the tattered edges of some great poetry.” After I said that, it almost appeared that the corpse’s jaw shifted ever so slightly, as though crinkling in its corners to cut a deeper smile.
“Dude, what are you doing in there?” Jim’s voice called from outside the heavy wooden doors. “Should I be concerned? I’d really like to keep my job.”
“Be right out!”
I was about to turn away from my hero when I felt a sudden compulsion. No, that doesn’t quite describe the sensation. I thought I heard someone whispering to me in the half-light of that room. At first I couldn’t distinguish a voice even—I just felt some light persuasive tickle in my ears. A percussive resonance, a ghost. Then I heard it again: “The extra button, take it.” This time there was little doubt I was encountering the familiar voice of my favorite author, living or dead.
“I don’t follow,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
“The spare button in my pants’ pocket,” the voice said—a bit louder than before, so that I felt convinced I wasn’t just imagining it. When I studied the corpse, however, it remained motionless and stiff.
“Don’t you want my help?” the voice said. “Don’t you want to learn how to be a great writer?”
“Dude…” Jim called again from outside.
“Coming—”
I reached into his moth-licked old suit, and I rummaged through his trouser pockets until I found a spare button affixed to a strand of cloth. I tugged until it disconnected in my hand, and then I placed the tiny black button in my dress shirt pocket over my left breast.
“Sorry,” Jim said as he stumbled into the room, “sure hope I’m not interrupting anything. I thought the whole necrophilia thing was just an insensitive joke, but now I’m starting to wonder…”
“Fuck off,” I said. “But thank you so much for this most, um, interesting evening.”
Soon enough I was driving home, half-expecting the button, or perhaps even the cadaverous voice of W.D. to loosen lips. But nothing unusual occurred on the drive back home. I admit that I drove with reckless abandon that evening, with an excitement that bordered on delirium.
I returned around midnight to my little apartment, a third floor wreck of a place overlooking suburban flower shops and second-rate delis. The first thing I did was unearth the button from my pocket and hold it in the palm of my hand.
“Hey, sir,” I said to the button.
“Working on anything interesting?” a soft whisper asked. To this day I’ll never know from where that speech arose, or even if it could be heard on any temporal plane. I later tried without success to record the voice and play it back, and yet I do not believe I imagined it, or that the voice only could be detected within my own mind.
“Nothing too interesting,” I replied, I whispered to the voice.
“Let me be the judge of that,” it answered. And of course it wasn’t just any voice, nor was it the voice of a button, it was the friendly old voice of W.D., rich and decorous as though he were narrating one of his own audiobooks.
I unfolded my laptop and opened up my most recent manuscript, a novel that I had started writing two months earlier with cautious excitement, but which had stalled, like my other attempts at long-form writing, around the fifty page mark.
In the dusty sandbox of Raven Town, came a drifting night of fury and sound.
“Is it a poem?” the voice interjected.
“No.”
“Then why in the world are you rhyming?”
“Because —”
“No, don’t even waste our time by arguing. Just delete and revise.”
In the dusty sandbox of Raven Town, a drifting night suddenly unfurled itself.
“Get rid of the adverb.”
“Adverb?”
“And you call yourself a writer?” the voice hissed. “Here’s a quick and dirty tip, they usually end in LY.” So I deleted suddenly. “Anything else?” I asked.
“You really shouldn’t end something as important as the opening line of a novel with ‘itself,’ a silly reflexive pronoun.”
“I was trying to write in your style.”
“I can see that—indeed, I don’t quite detect the gift of originality here. But if you’re going to grift, at least do me the honor of not bastardizing my frame of reference.”
“Anything else?”
“You know, I strove to never be cross or insulate with my own daemon,” the voice said with a slightly menacing undertone. “If we’re going to have an effective working relationship then I simply must insist that you treat me with a bit more respect. That and cut down on the purple prose!”
“Fine, why don’t you just tell me what to write?”
“Typical of your generation,” the voice said. “You know, daemons of prior epochs never had to carry so much water. Anyway, I’m a little rusty, given my unfortunate passing, but here goes: Raven Town was a dusty sandbox of a place.”
“What about the drifting night part?”
“We’ll get there,” W.D. replied, “though I’m not sure what’s drifting aside from your reader’s attention span. But first let’s make sure we’re writing in an active rather than a passive voice.”
And so it went, for the next five hours: W.D.’s voice setting forth ground rules, me essentially taking dictation of my own novel.
“Are you upset that I lifted your writing style?” I asked before we finished editing the first chapter, still wishing to impress W.D.
“Something something about imitation and flattery,” the voice replied. “But you simply must find your own voice. And before that, you need to buy a copy of Strunk and White.
“I already own the Elements of Style,” I said with some evident pride.
“Great, then now seems like a great time to actually read it.”
Over the ensuing weeks W.D. started to subsume both my writing and my life. It was quite demanding.
“You know,” I said one evening over a tall glass of Alka-Seltzer, “I’ve decided that writing is really more of a hobby for me, something fun to burn off steam after work.”
“Fun?” the Daemon said, “Writing’s not fun—never was and never will be. If you want a ‘fun’ hobby then you may as well start a stamp-collection or find a local bordello. Really,” the voice continued, “I’ve never before heard anything quite so stupid.”
It was growing increasingly difficult to keep up with my day job inspecting wire mesh at a steel factory. Every night W.D. would tug at my brain, insisting we work on the novel. And it was never interesting stuff like brainstorming ideas, world-building, or drafting new chapters, just the endless polishing, the writing and rewriting of the fifty pages I had already completed. It seemed my daemon never slept, he would come to me in my dreams with myriad book recommendations, or with threats to “take the reins,” if I didn’t “stop viewing the world through tired metaphors and symbols.”
“Please I begged—while awake, while asleep—please just let me have a life!”
“You took the button and now our existences are intertwined,” W.D.’s pushy voice said, “Now do you wish to be a quality writer of fiction or not?”
“Maybe I don’t,” I said.
“Bullshit,” W.D. said. “How is it that I’m dead and yet I have more life than you?”
“Can’t you go inspire somebody else?”
“If you don’t get back to work, I’m going to leave you deader than I am,” the voice said. I began to live my life in a constant bleak horror.
Physical exams, CT scans, the works…all showed normal functioning. I was left with two possibilities: I was either losing my mind, or the neuro-ghost of my favorite author really had set up shop in my brain, with the newly stated goal of continuing “his” writing career.
“Truly, I think you’re an admirable vessel,” W.D. intoned one morning as I ate a soggy bowl of grain cereal. “But as for the creative business, well, there is no sense in further sugar-coating it. You’re simply not up to the task, and you never will be because you refuse to learn. I think it would be better if from now on we went our separate ways at the desk.”
“But we can’t go our separate ways,” I screamed, slamming down my spoon, “you’re literally in my mind.”
“Good God, your generation and the misuse of ‘literally,’ don’t even get me started,” my daemon said, “But no need to digress now, I fear I must simply lay out my case. The novel you started was amateurish drivel. It’s unsalvageable, as lifeless as my physical form. Even with my insightful edits, it will never become more than a self-published monstrosity, or even worse, turn us into one of those hack midlist writers; a fate I simply can’t abide. If we’re going to find true literary success, then it’s imperative that I give you straight dictation from hence forward.”
At that point his voice softened, taking on the tone of a teacher disappointed in a former star pupil. “Listen, if you had only read the greats as I suggested, then perhaps things would be different. How hard could it really be to read Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson, Octavia Butler, Ray Bradbury? It’s not like I was asking you to start with Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible—”
“But you already lived,” I shouted. “Seventy-seven years, you gluttonous, gluttonous thing.”
“I had more stories in me!” W.D. screamed. “I had more stories and you’re going to help me exorcise them…”
That evening I sat in a near-darkness, save the sloping chalice of light that was my awaiting laptop.
“All right,” I said. “There’s a blank page and a curser, have at it.”
“Just give me a minute,” the Daemon said.
We sat there in a spider’s cocoon of silence for five minutes, then ten.
“You still there?” I asked.
“Hold on, just trying to gather my thoughts,” the voice said. “You know, I never utilized dictation before. That must be the problem.”
“Take your time,” I said, blurry-eyed. “We’ve got all night.”
“Just need to feed the muse, is all.”
“I thought you were the muse.”
“Don’t be silly,” the Daemon said. “Muses are almost invariably beautiful young women—do I seem to fit that profile? No, I’m a Daemon.”
“You’re so out of touch with the times.”
“And you’re bothering me while I’m trying to write!”
Night after night continued in that manner, with no work produced. There was always some new excuse from the Daemon: the lighting wasn’t right, he preferred to write in the mornings, I was “stressing him out with my breathing.”
He would threaten to murder me in my sleep, to force me into a Victorian madness that would end in both our deaths. The nightmare took over my every moment.
Meanwhile, at the factory my boss Trevor was growing increasingly impatient with my lack of production on the line.
“Hey,” he said one morning under a ragged sea of fluorescent lights in our break-room. “Come see me later.”
“When later came I found Trevor sitting, feet up on his desk, watching reruns of Matlock on his computer.
“You ever watch this show?” he said with a sideways smirk.
“No, not re—”
“A bit before your time, I suppose,” Trevor said while pausing the video. He stood up and mock bowed his graying head in a solemn manner.
“You know that I like you.”
“Thank you sir, I like you too.”
“Well, Kumbaya.” He patted me roughly on my shoulder. “But I have bosses too,” he said while stroking his chin. “And if you fuck up, it makes it seem like I also fucked up. You got that concept?”
“Yes sir,” I said.
“So please, for the love of God, or Satan, or whatever it is your generation prays to these days, stop approving defective mesh. Have a little professional pride. We do important work here. We simply can’t have any holes in our mesh. I mean our mesh process—of course there is holes in mesh.”
“Got it,” I said.
And he smiled wanly, waved his hand as though he were some powerful king dismissing a peasant, and resumed his seat and his Matlock.
That evening the Daemon was also in a particularly sour mood.
It was a night that was dark and stormy.
“Cliches, cliches,” the voice screamed. “Oh, everything has already been done, and I should know, because I’ve already done it.”
“Maybe if you just relaxed a little,” I said. “Just let it flow. Just let it come to you.”
“Let it flow?” the voice said. “Let it come to me? What are you, some hipster Jack Kerouac wannabe? What’s your next suggestion, that we smoke some grass, turn on a black light, and discuss the benefits of socialism?”
“Well, it might be more productive than whatever this is,” I said.
“If only my Daemon were here with me,” he said.
“Interesting,” I said. “I didn’t know you really had a Daemon.”
“Of course I did. All great writers do.”
“What if your Daemon was the true talent, like how you’re more talented than I am?”
“Whatever are you implying?”
“It was a pretty simple question, W.D.. I mean in any duo there’s a Simon and a Garfunkel, right? I wonder which one you were…”
“See! You’re sabotaging my efforts,” W.D. said. “How can I get into a creative groove when you’re here heckling and debating me? After all, confidence is half the battle in this game.”
The night was chunky with moonlight.
“God, no. Chunky? What is the moon, a can of soup?” the voice hissed.
“Maybe if you focused.”
“If you speak again I’m going to shout lalalalala in your mind for weeks until you take razor blade to wrist, I mean it!”
I suppose like most writers, I was somewhat terrified of my daemon. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll try not to speak.”
This continued for another week or so, until I decided to take action.
So it came to be, one sticky evening under a chunky moon, that I visited the burial ground of W.D. Exhausted by nearly a month of internal (or was it meta-internal?) struggle, my pale visage feeling barely attached to my own sagging neck, our unique shared journey culminated with my back curved and a moldering old shovel in my hand, digging up earth. Lightening sizzled through the sky, and I felt a haunting sense of dread. I knew that W.D. was stubborn, if nothing else, and that my life was very much at risk. But I also recognized that if this continued, my life wasn’t worth a hell of a lot anyway.
As the cliche goes, never meet your heroes. (And if you ever do, I humbly suggest you don’t allow them to possess you.)
“Here lies famous author W.D.,” my daemon read, “I’m glad they honored the inscription I wrote for my tombstone.”
“If only the world knew you have no talent,” I said. “It was all your daemon.”
“You’re a true enemy,” he said. “That antagonist of this very tale. What do you think you’re doing anyway, digging up my grave?”
“I’m taking back control,” I shouted, lightning cracking overhead and a susurrus of thunder slamming upon the clay earth of that dead zone.
“There is no control, only the illusion of control,” W.D. shouted. Then, “Hey, you should write that down, we might be able to use that. Never mind, we don’t want to reduce ourselves to cliches.”
“There is no we anymore,” I screamed. “I’m putting your button back where it belongs!”
“I’ll tell you exactly where you can stick that button….”
And I was able to bury the button, somewhere beneath the casket (as I couldn’t get the coffin open and I had forgotten a crowbar). But by then the police had been summoned, and before I knew it I was booked and charged with trespassing and a host of other bizarre and archaic misdemeanors.
After I posted bail, thanks to a big unexpected assist from my stepmother (who loathes me), I eventually returned to my apartment. For the first time in a month I heard no noise in my head. By then I had lost my job, my self-respect, any future dating prospects in my small town, but I had gained the most important thing of all, or so I thought: clarity.
I felt so good, I immediately decided to work on my own draft. I opened up the computer and enjoyed its gentle buzzing, the humble hum of that miraculous machine. I opened my writing document to page fifty, and I started to type new words, unfiltered words.
But as I neared the bottom of the page, the oasis of my creativity was breached by the familiar voice of my daemon.
“Wow,” it said, “All this time you really thought I was in the button? What a mouth breather you are!”
“Please forgive me,” I said. “I just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You’re going to die.”
But I didn’t, at least not yet. And in time W.D. and I learned to work together. I’m still not in love with having two voices in my head at all times, but I’m proud of my new career as a mid-list author, even if W.D. finds it shameful and “beneath him.” These days, I get to lecture to would-be writers about the creative process. I never let them in on my little secret, and they never seem to suspect.
But of course, I always shudder when they ask about my influences. And I’ve never, ever, explain where my ideas come from.
Until now…